# AMD Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, designing CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and adaptive computing accelerators. Founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders as a second-source manufacturer of [[Intel]] chips, AMD spent decades as the scrappy underdog of [[Silicon Valley]] before a dramatic turnaround in the mid-2010s transformed it into a trillion-dollar-adjacent competitor across every major chip market. ## Lisa Su and the Turnaround Lisa Su became CEO in October 2014, inheriting a company worth roughly $3 billion, burdened with debt, and hemorrhaging market share to [[Intel]] in processors and [[NVIDIA]] in graphics. Born in [[Taiwan]] and holding a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, Su had previously worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor before joining AMD in 2012. Her turnaround playbook was blunt: spin off the money-losing foundry operations, focus entirely on chip design, and bet the company on a new architecture. The 2017 Zen architecture reset restored CPU competitiveness, the EPYC server line pried meaningful share from [[Intel]] in data centers, and the Ryzen consumer line took the enthusiast desktop crown. By mid-2026, AMD shares traded above $540 with a market cap approaching $890 billion — a roughly 40x increase from Su's first day. Time named her CEO of the Year in 2024 and one of its "Architects of AI" for its 2025 Person of the Year issue. ## CPU Competition with Intel AMD's gains against [[Intel]] in the x86 CPU market have been relentless. The EPYC server processor line reached a record 46.2% of x86 server CPU revenue share in Q1 2026, up from near-zero a decade earlier. On the desktop side, Ryzen held roughly 35% unit share through late 2025 before settling at 33% in early 2026. In notebooks, AMD's mobile CPU revenue share climbed to about 29% in Q1 2026. [[Intel]] retains the majority of consumer PC unit shipments but has seen its server revenue advantage narrow dramatically as cloud hyperscalers and enterprises adopt EPYC at scale. ## AI and the GPU Arms Race AMD is the primary challenger to [[NVIDIA]] in the [[Artificial Intelligence]] accelerator market, where [[NVIDIA]] holds an estimated 80%+ share thanks largely to its entrenched CUDA software ecosystem. AMD's Instinct MI300 series launched in late 2023, followed by the MI350 series in Q3 2025 featuring 288 GB of HBM3e memory and 8 TB/s bandwidth. The MI400 series rack-scale solution is slated for late 2026, with the MI450 series under development for deployment with [[OpenAI]] as part of a multi-year partnership announced in 2025. Tier-one customer wins with [[Microsoft]], [[Meta]], [[OpenAI]], and [[Oracle Corporation]] have validated AMD as a credible alternative for inference workloads and cost optimization. AMD's ROCm open-source software stack continues to narrow the ecosystem gap with CUDA, though it remains a significant competitive moat for [[NVIDIA]]. ## Xilinx Acquisition In February 2022, AMD completed its $49 billion all-stock acquisition of Xilinx, the largest semiconductor deal in history at the time. The purchase added Xilinx's field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and adaptive systems-on-chip to AMD's portfolio, expanding its total addressable market by roughly 70% to $135 billion. The deal gave AMD a foothold in telecommunications, automotive, aerospace and defense, and healthcare — sectors where FPGAs handle specialized acceleration workloads that general-purpose GPUs and CPUs cannot efficiently serve. ## TSMC Manufacturing Dependency AMD is a fabless chip designer, meaning it designs but does not manufacture its own chips. Virtually all of AMD's advanced processors are fabricated by [[TSMC]] in [[Taiwan]], making AMD heavily dependent on [[TSMC]]'s capacity and geopolitical stability in the Taiwan Strait. AMD is expected to be among the first customers for [[TSMC]]'s 2nm process node. [[TSMC]]'s expansion of its Arizona fabs — backed by $165 billion in planned investment — offers some supply chain diversification, though CEO Lisa Su has acknowledged that domestically manufactured chips may cost roughly 20% more. ## CHIPS and Science Act As a fabless designer reliant on [[TSMC]], AMD has not received direct [[CHIPS and Science Act]] manufacturing grants (those went to companies operating fabs, such as [[Intel]], [[TSMC]], and Micron). However, AMD benefits indirectly: [[TSMC]]'s Arizona expansion was catalyzed in part by $6.6 billion in [[CHIPS and Science Act]] funding, and the broader onshoring effort strengthens AMD's domestic supply chain resilience. AMD leadership has publicly supported the legislation, calling domestic manufacturing "a very good investment" for strategic resilience. ## Export Controls and China Exposure U.S. [[Department of Commerce]] export restrictions have significantly impacted AMD's business with [[China]], which historically accounted for roughly 20-25% of company revenue. In April 2025, expanded licensing requirements hit AMD's advanced AI accelerators, leading to a projected $1.5 billion revenue loss for the year and an $800 million charge related to unsellable MI308 inventory. AMD resumed limited [[China]] sales of certain chips under a conditions-based arrangement in August 2025, but policy unpredictability has become a permanent feature of the company's [[China]] strategy. Starting in January 2026, the MI325X requires individual case-by-case export licenses, and a 25% tariff further compresses margins on approved shipments. ## Defense and Government AMD chips are embedded across military systems, from power management to high-performance computing in defense platforms. The company partnered with [[Raytheon]] on multi-chip packaging for defense applications. The [[Department of Defense]]'s broader push to secure domestic microelectronics supply chains — including a $25.3 billion Pentagon microelectronics contracting vehicle awarded in late 2025 — underscores the strategic importance of U.S.-designed silicon. AMD's EPYC processors are deployed in multiple government supercomputing installations. ## Stock and Market Position AMD's market trajectory under Lisa Su ranks among the greatest turnarounds in semiconductor history. From a market cap of roughly $3 billion in 2014 to approximately $888 billion by mid-2026, the stock appreciated nearly 40x. Revenue reached $25.8 billion in 2024, with the data center segment — encompassing both EPYC server CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators — driving the majority of growth. The company's strategic positioning across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and adaptive computing gives it the broadest product portfolio of any pure-play chip designer competing with both [[Intel]] and [[NVIDIA]] simultaneously. ## See Also - [[NVIDIA]] — primary GPU and AI accelerator competitor - [[Intel]] — historic CPU rival - [[TSMC]] — sole advanced-node manufacturing partner - [[OpenAI]] — major AI customer deploying Instinct GPUs - [[CHIPS and Science Act]] — U.S. semiconductor industrial policy - [[Artificial Intelligence]] — driving AMD's data center growth